Bio-Diesel/Biodiesel Energy and Other Energy Resources, Alternative Energy

Ambassador Ronald F. Lehman, Director, Center for Global Security Research, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

BROOKS: Dr. Lehman currently heads the Center for Global Security Research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He’s also the Chair of the Governing Board of the International Science and Technology Center, which is an effort to take the brainpower of Russian scientists and turn it to peaceful uses, not exclusively in the nuclear area, but heavily in the nuclear area.

He has a long career in government. He was the Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, where I worked for him. He was a Senior Director and Special Assistant in the White House in the Reagan administration, where I worked for him. And he was the chief negotiator for the Start One Treaty where I replaced him and has served in the Pentagon as Assistant Secretary, has served in the Armed Services Committee in the Senate and has been on more boards than you would care to hear.

LEHMAN: When I was first asked to speak, I was asked to speak about international fissile material controls. And I said, “Well, actually, the topic is broader. It ought to be “International Nuclear Controls.”” I notice on the program Bob Pfaltzgraff and his team got it right and I notice on my first viewgraph I got it wrong. So, I begin by apologizing.

Let me say that in preparing my remarks, I’m going to draw from a number of our annual Futures Roundtables that we held out at Livermore over the last few years, but most particularly from this year’s project, which is not surprisingly, “Atoms for Peace after 50 Years.” Many of the participants in the various workshops in Europe and Japan are in this audience. So, I don’t presume to speak for them. Indeed, I don’t presume to speak for any entity with which I am now, or have been, or might likely in the future be associated. These are my own views.

And since my basic theme is that we are dealing with a great deal of uncertainty, it may well be that when the day is done, these may not even be my views. So, with that caveat, let me begin. Since I speak last, I work on the assumption that there will be no time available and everything I want to say has already been said. I think neither of those is actually true. But, nevertheless, to prepare for that contingency, I thought I would begin at the end with the conclusion, which is that we already have a huge legacy of stockpile overhang and, in fact, it’s already being deal with in many ways, in a highly international way.

I won’t repeat what Lint and Paul and Larry have already, and Philip, have already said about many types of international cooperation and activities that are involved in this process. But what I do want to suggest is that in our discussions, in our roundtables, around the world, it is quite clear that there are a lot of ideas, that people think that more can be done in this area and that the time for making those decisions is here, not simply because it’s the 50th anniversary, but also because the objective conditions have changed.

My thesis today is really very simple, that the future of international fissile material control depends on the future of international fissile material, which depends on the future of what we mean by international, which seems to be determined by what is going to happen in terms of technology, politics and economics of nation states and non-state entities. In short, there are certain objective conditions out there that are going to shape the decision space.

One is that in our group I think there is a strong feeling that in advanced western industrialized societies, the big decisions on things like nuclear power will be made based on certain economic realities. But there was quite a bit of difference of opinion as to what value should be placed on externalities and what should be done about it. Should there have been compensation? Should there have been a leveling of the field? But there was a recognition that many of these externalities are terribly important.

I remember, not too long ago, going to visit the IAEA in Vienna. I met with the safeguards people and in that era their view was they were not interested in proliferation resistant technologies because they had a mandate to do a certain job and they were quite confident that they could do that job. The interesting thing was it was the nuclear energy side that was most interested in proliferation resistant systems. And when you asked why was that so, the answer was because this was an externality, this was a political problem for the advancement of nuclear power. It was a box to be checked and somebody had to do that.

In our discussions, what seems to have changed is, that the vision of safeguards and securing material has become much broader and deeper, in particular as a result of, not only the concern about proliferation from nation state but concern about non-state entities and terrorism. And, indeed, what one has seen and later I will talk about some of the IAEA views, a much broader vision of how you secure material. There was a lot of discussion in our groups about whether or not the objective conditions mean that nuclear energy is going to expand.

You’ve all heard the discussions of climate change, environment, hydrogen economies, a lot of discussion of those issues. At the same time there is a recognition, and I thought Dr. Wagner was quite eloquent in describing, that on the one hand the public still has an aversion to radiation when it is associated with nuclear power. One only needs to have watched the Discovery Channel’s program on Three Mile Island last night to understand how public think about that.

On the other hand, the reality is in the United States that nuclear medicine is a bigger industry impacting in many ways on many people’s lives more intrusively, more profoundly and more positively and you get an entirely different attitude. So many of the participants in the workshops are saying things like, “Why can’t we explain to the public a new form of risk benefit analysis. And yet we run into this dilemma, which is that it is precisely in the nuclear community, where people have done best practices and risk benefit analysis, and it doesn’t sell.

But, as I said, for the most part, the drivers that were impacting on international fissile control in our working group, partly because of the kind of participants we had, was the international security dimension. And that, too, is transformed. The Cold War is over and yet, a lot of concern about what is international governance with the end of the Cold War? Is there some kind of new world order with a common core of values or are we headed towards spheres of influence and regional balances that may turn out to have regional economies and regional approaches to dealing with regional threats and do you organize how you deal with nuclear material and nuclear risks in that way or some other way.

I think one of the most important things to emerge having to do with fissile material out of all of this, is the recognition that it’s not just that nuclear is dual-use, double-edged sword. It’s the feeling that the latency of weapons capability is becoming more pervasive and that you’re now dealing with incremental movement towards weapons capability that takes place in such small steps that the international community and even nations can’t respond in an effective way, like the frog in the pot. The temperature rises so slowly that we’re going to get cooked before we ever react to something that should have been seen as inevitable.

So, for example, we did a study on verifying the agreed framework in Korea and everybody wanted to know, “Well, how do you shore up the IAEA’s ability to deal with diversion?” Well, what we found is there are some scenarios that are a problem. But there are actually relatively easy fixes to those scenarios. The problem is not diversion from the IAEA. The problem is covert facility, third country help and breakout. And the nonproliferation regime has not figured out how effectively to deal with those issues.

How bad is this problem of the spread of technology? I would like to just highlight a couple of points that have come out on perspectives on the spread of nuclear capability. President Eisenhower, as was pointed out, said that, “The knowledge that will eventually be shared by others, possibly all others.” It has spread widely, obviously not to all of the 194 countries that signed treaties. But it is important to remember that 75 countries today either have reactors, had them recently or are about to have them. And there were only 60 members of the UN when Eisenhower gave his speech.

I mean you can quibble but the reality is the technology associated with nuclear power and the potential for nuclear weapons has spread widely. Many people have focused on Kennedy’s speech in 1963 and he said that perhaps 15 or 20 nations might have nuclear weapons by the year 2000. Clearly if you take a look at it from the point of view that we also had some rollback countries, 13 nations probably acquired nuclear weapons before the turn of the century. And Mohamed ElBaradei and his Economist article that you may or may not have seen this week, in which he lays out a proposal I will mention, says there are 35 or 45 countries in the know and points out the problems of 50 countries who have spent fuel.

I’m going to skip this chart. It just simply lists the number of countries that are involved. But I wanted to put the context of fissile material control in the context of strategic thinking by the participants in our workshops. And, basically, we asked the question, “Will the significance of civilian applications be less, the same, or more in the future and will the significance of military applications be less, the same, or more in the future?” We discovered we had participants who believed that all of these possibilities-- I mean we had a participant who would support each of these as the most likely possibility. And some even advocated those positions.

Of course the other schools were more of everything or less of everything but I think a sizeable group wanted to emphasize the most important point again, which is we are already in this world given the overhang of materials that already exists. We had a number of recommendations in general that are coming out of this report. All of them involve getting more confidence in how we deal with fissile material.
Eisenhower’s speech in many ways has become the foundation for thinking about this problem in our group. His basic proposal was fairly straightforward. It was the superpowers would take the material out of their stock on an incremental pragmatic basis and make it available for peaceful uses. But he had a broader context, which involved political change in addressing the security circumstances.

Mohamed El Baradei has, in this week, in The Economist put forth a proposal. From the fissile material point of view there are three major steps that he proposes. One is to put reprocessing enrichment under multi-lateral control, without explicitly stating what he means by multi-lateral control. He also emphasizes the application of proliferation resistant technologies in the future but he really thinks the time has come to consider multi-lateral approaches to the management and disposal of spent fuel and radioactive waste.

He, like Eisenhower puts this in a broader framework, which some may like and others may not. But one of the most important points he makes, that I think is in contrast in some ways with Eisenhower, even though they both had a bold vision, that Eisenhower thought you started small with those particular parties of specific concern and you expanded to make progress. Mohamed ElBaradei is talking about starting anew, bringing everybody together in something of a grand bargain. So this is going to be a very interesting time to debate the question of international control of nuclear materials.

What about these very important cooperative threat reduction efforts? How do they fit into the project? A second big question is what is to be internationalized? Are we really just talking here about storage, some improvement in competence in accounting? Are we actually talking about international protection and management or are we talking about ownership? We need to ask the question, what is the value sought by internationalization? In many cases what is sought is legitimacy. In other cases what is sought is confidence.

But what different players are seeking from internationalization is different and I think we need to sort that out. We have to deal with the question of, to what degree do uniform norms address very different economic and political security circumstances. And, of course, the questions of, are international organizations up to all of these tasks that some people want them to have? Is an international bureaucracy in a distant capital necessarily the best place to run a sensitive facility with safety and security concerns? A lot of issues there--

How urgent is the internationalization? Is this something that takes place over a long period of time or is it something that has to take place first in order for all of the positive events to happen. And, finally, quite candidly, does it supplement, amend, or replace the current NPT regime? What has been interesting to see is that the traditional view is that the NPT provides the core around which some differences-- Everyone is building the foundation for peaceful cooperation in the future.

On the other hand, there is an argument increasingly being made across the etiological spectrum that a new bargain is necessary, a bigger bargain is necessary and that some of the elements inherent in the NPT are not sufficient to deal with countries outside the NPT and countries that feel that they are inadequately served by being in the NPT. So let me stop there and say, it’s a volatile time. We’ve got a lot of questions and I hope the audience has the answers. Thank you.

If it were true that Iran would be prepared to completely dismantle its enrichment activities in exchange for some kind of a guarantee for long-term fuel supply from outside, presumably the European Union from what I understand to be the case, and that this could be done in the context of an additional protocol with all of the bells and whistles of transparency that that could bring-- We may need even more. Then I see this going in a very, very constructive direction because I think this would be a bell weather for how other countries would have to try to treat this approach to their fuel cycle desires in the future.

Iran is a real test case in this regard. If on the other hand, what looks to is to take a leaf from Ron’s book, some kind of a multi-nationalization of an Iranian enrichment program sitting on Iranian territory, that becomes more problematic and I would be concerned about that, although I must say that, if I think about some of the questions that Ron just raised in his run down of the issues of what do we mean by this, that, and the other, there’s no need for us to be uniform in how we approach this. I think we can take this region by region or country set by country set as long as we stay within the parameters of the arrangement that brings about the outcome that we desire, which is avoidance of further proliferation.

HORNER: Dan Horner from McGraw Hill Nuclear Publications. I think that you just made a-- I’ll pose this question as a devil’s advocate question and then ask the panelists to respond. In Paul Longsworth’s presentation he mentioned, as part of the U.S. nonproliferation efforts, the effort with regard to the U.S. supplied research reactor overseas and converting those reactors and bringing back the HEU fuel. But wasn’t the supplying of those reactors a direct outgrowth of the Atoms for Peace Program and, in that respect, isn’t that a proliferation downside of the Atoms for Peace Proposal and wouldn’t your job have been easier if that aspect hadn’t taken place?

LONGSWORTH: You know, it’s not, and I’m going to give you a strange answer here. It’s not, because the original deal was that the spent fuel from those reactors would come back to the U.S. and I think, even in 1953 when they kicked that program off as the-- We realized that obviously we needed to repatriate the nuclear material. It is a strange answer because we are going to complete about half of the fuel that we’ve identified in an environmental impact statement by-- In the next few years we will have only addressed about half of the fuel that, again, we designated to come back to the United States.

LEHMAN: The Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty was initially envisioned as sort of either of two things, one was a universal treaty open to all parties, the other was something that one would do, maybe on an interim basis or a regional basis, but primarily focused on South Asia and perhaps the Middle East, i.e., the non-parties as well as the weapon states. Interestingly enough, there was a UN resolution in the General Assembly co-sponsored by both the United States and India, supporting a fissile material cutoff. And all the P-5 have said that they can live with it.

Having said that, it is in the conference on disarmament. It’s caught up on linkages, by and large issues such as Pakistan’s concern about making sure that it deals with residual stocks. It is not enough to cut off the production for weapons purposes; they want to deal with the existing stocks. There’s linkages to India by the issue of a time bound framework for disarmament. In short, there’s been maybe some flexibility on each of those, at least expressed by the parties. But the process seems bogged down in the CD.

BROOKS: I would like to just add that as the community thinks about the future, the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty is a good example of the limitations of formal multi-lateral arms control. It’s it’s one of the reasons why we probably need to spend more time thinking about, as Ron said in his presentation, whether “international” means the same sort of thing that it has always meant or whether there are commercial international agreements a la the USEC Agreement that are, at least part of the solution.

__: Question for Mr. Sewell, I was intrigued by his suggestion with regard to the government sponsoring a reactor, the intent of which is to get rid of the, let me call it, surplus nuclear materials in Russia and, perhaps, even our own defense programs. We are not only having the problem with uranium 235, we also have a problem with regard to plutonium 239. And if the real objective is to get rid of those materials-- There have been people said, “Well, you just bury them.”

And the idea that we put forward, in terms of government support in burning basically, nuclear materials, is just that. It’s an idea of the government and industry to grasp and design in a way that’s optimum, optimum in terms of meeting policy objectives by the government and the world community and also in a way that will help provide incentives to build a new nuclear reactor that will get things started, with respect to the increased use of nuclear power that has so many benefits.

BROOKS: Let me just point out a third concept that’s actually what we’re doing. Some of the defense HEU is, in fact, being burned in U.S. reactors -- TVA reactors. In addition, at a galacticly slow pace, we are working with the Russian Federation to the elimination of 34 tons of weapons plutonium in each country through conversion into MOX fuel. It doesn’t make any economic sense either but it does allow us to take advantage of existing reactors.

However, what I have experienced is, when you get more into the, I’ll use the generic phrase, cooperative threat reduction and constructive engagement, you start to deal with practical problems that inevitably have to deal with the specific differences. And in many cases, I think the great debate about the future of arms control, international constraint and cooperative threat reduction is really the great debate between how much emphasis you put on standardization of norms and how much emphasis do you put on engagement, constructive engagement.

LONGSWORTH: You know there are so many nuances with how safeguards work actually gets done at facilities and I’d just like to parrot what Ambassador Lehman said. Inspections are the tool to the end not the objective. And I think everyone would agree that the IAEA probably spends a lot of money inspecting facilities that are not really a proliferation risk. For example, in the U.S., I don’t think anybody has accused the U.S. of selling plutonium or weapons on the open market. But because inspections are a tool and because of the universality principle, I think we allow inspectors to come in and we fully support that but it is a problem because it does take limited IAEA resources and the UN is inspecting facilities that don’t pose a great proliferation risk. But it is the way you get other countries to open up their facilities. So it is a tool to the end.

LYMAN: Hi. I’m Ed Lyman with the Union of Concerned Scientists. I wanted to ask a follow-up question to Dan Horner’s question on research reactors. With all due respect, I don’t think you really gave a complete answer to the question of whether exporting HEU research reactors all over the world was the best idea or not and, in fact, the other part of the answer you left out, is that not only are we taking the spent fuel back but we are persuading reactors that we had shipped that only used highly enriched uranium to convert so they no longer need to use highly enriched uranium but can use low enriched.

And that was a flaw in the original regime that we’re trying to play catch up on. In that respect, I’d just like to ask you, it would be a terrible legacy, 50 years after Atoms for Peace, if our own export control law was to be significantly weakened, yet that’s exactly what’s going on in Congress right now, where’s there’s an attempt to modify the U.S. HEU export control laws to make it easier for certain countries to receive highly enriched uranium without any obligation to work with the US to convert.

LONGSWORTH: Let me start at the beginning of your question and work through it. It wasn’t possible to build reactors at the time with low enriched fuel to achieve what you needed to do for science, medicine, agriculture and other purposes. I wouldn’t describe it as a flaw in the original approach because I think the United States took the best course available to it at the time was, we’ll send the fuel out and we’ll take it back. And it’s taken 50 years to start doing that but we’re making progress on that.

One of the programs that we carry out is to convert these reactors as I mentioned in my remarks. With regard to the Burr, Schummer, depending on which one is being debated in the energy bill, you know, interestingly enough, we were unaware that that provision was in there. I believe we are opposed to it. Frankly, I may get in a lot of trouble here, but I think we were opposed to the Schummer amendment because we have all of those authorities that Schummer, which was the underlying provision that was amended, that it required us to take a lot of steps that aren’t necessarily appropriate to have in the statute.

__: I was glad to hear of Mr. Sewell’s proposals for cost-benefit to the public of expanding nuclear power to burn up some of these materials. It doesn’t stretch my imagination very much to think that the public would also accept a certain amount of public funds going to try to purchase this material and keep it out of the hands of terrorists, if it is only a few billion dollars a year, when the public supports hundreds of billions for defense, if the public was just explained the affect of not doing this compared to the effect of the 9/11 incident on our country.

BROOKS: Well, I’ll answer it. Secretary Abraham proposed and his Russian counterpart agreed well over a year ago to a parallel program that would create a strategic uranium reserve. We would purchase basically whatever the Russians would chose to sell us and the quantity is still being debated. Right now it is only a few tons a year. Blend it down and make it sort of the uranium equivalent of the strategic petroleum reserve. It would just sit there minding it’s own business, but it would be in a form that would be suitable for energy us and unsuitable for weapons use.

There is dispute on the hill as to whether that is good use of public funds and I’ll let you know when I see the appropriations act. But the idea is one that the President thought of a year ago and it’s basically a good idea. We’re also purchasing, and this is small amounts, I mean small amounts in the Russian context but large amounts in anybody else’s, HEU from Russia for the handful of U.S. research reactors that have not yet been converted to low enrichment fuel. They’ll be burning Russian HEU here very shortly, once again, the will of the funders permitting, and I’m pretty sure it will.

__: Firstly, I would like to make one historical remark. Indeed, historically, all technologies have become, as they were introduced ...(inaudible) technologies, and all have proliferated in the past. So, what we’re trying to do here is historically, totally, unprecedented and, therefore, one should not be surprised that it is extremely difficult. I mean that is one remark. In that sense, Administrator Longsworth gave a list of the program achievement and his note was certainly quite optimistic. And there are, indeed, many achievements to be proud of.

But I think it is a matter of the glass either being half full or half empty, namely, there have been developing many impediments and the time scale in which some of these programs have been proceeding have slipped really extremely badly. I mean the plutonium disposition has slipped very badly that one is now talking about 17 years, or whatever the number is. There have been glitches in the HEU Purchase Agreement. There are major problems in the MPC&A [Material Protection, Control and Accounting] improvement in Russia due to, on the Russian side, them not giving access sufficiently, on the American side, due to the insistence on liability protection for the American participants.

BROOKS: Let me, because I think that is really a question that is addressed to those of us who are in government. I can tell you that Secretary of Energy has been more active, as far as I’m concerned, than any Secretary in history in trying to accelerate programs and remove roadblocks I can tell you that the President has been active in pushing these. I can tell you that it was discussed with President Putin at Camp David. And so we are trying to accelerate but I think the honest answer is, it is a very slow process and a very difficult process.

I think that is going to have to be the last question. As I listen to your comments and the comments of the panel, I came to sort of three broad conclusions that I will leave with you. One is that the international regime that grew out of President Eisenhower’s vision, hasn’t done everything, but it’s done a lot. The second is that there are lots of good ideas for the future and we ought to explore those, but all those good ideas are going to take time. And, therefore, I guess, the third is that redoubling our efforts at material protection is probably pretty important in the near term.